Percy (One)

Our new dog, named for the beloved poet,

Ate a book which unfortunately we had

Left unguarded.

Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita,

Of which many copies are available.

Every day now, as Percy grows

Into the beauty of his life, we touch

His wild, curly head and say,

“Oh, wisest of little dogs.”

The self-help book market has exploded in the recent decade and spiritual/religious offerings too are abundant in stores and on the internet. We have daily meditations perched on the commode tank, daily inspirations popping up automatically in our email, and just yesterday I just heard advertised on the radio “California Psychics” who will do a reading for you on the phone to help you discover your deepest truths. It seems we humans devour wisdom where ever we may. But are we really digesting it? Does the wisdom of the ages just pass through us? I am thinking of Percy, the young dog, and young of our own kind. Perhaps they, like us, grow into our wild beauty and don’t need the extra help of books and lectures. Oh sure, don’t get me wrong, we can all use refinement. But what if we looked at our children, at our friends and enemies, and at ourselves as beautiful wild beings, even when they “chew” up what is precious to us? Instead of blaming, we say to all,”oh wise and beautiful one.” We offer our hearts, knowing that books can always be replaced.

How do you do to grow in wisdom, beauty, and wildness?

What Is There Beyond Knowing

What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me? I can’t

Turn in any direction

But it’s there. I don’t mean

The leaves grip and shine or even the thrush’s

Silk song, but the far-off

Fires, for example,

Of the stars, heaven’s slowly turning

Theater of light, or the wind

Playful with its breath;

Or time that’s always rushing forward,

Or standing still

In the same-what shall I say-

Moment.

What I know

I could put into a pack

As if it were bread and cheese, and carry it

On one shoulder,

Important and honorable, but so small!

While everything else continues, unexplained

And unexplainable. How wonderful it is

In Mary we see such consistent homage to pantheism – the mystery and sacred interconnection is here in the life before us. In this poem I see emerging a thread of panentheism – god is all around us and beyond us as well – in time, in the sky and wind, and in the mystery. Perhaps it is a relief to be able to turn away from the face of god as she comes to us in insect and bird song and towering tree. We just need a break from all the glory so that we may be empty and therefore be vessels ready to fill up with what is. For if we try to know what is, we have sealed our soul’s containers. I myself am like a Starbucks coffee cup – I do place a lid on my spirit by wanting to know and to control, but then an accident comes my way, I tip, I leak, and I spill myself out. It’s a terrible mess, believe me, and often the catastrophe happens in public. But what could be more pleasurable than to be holding an empty cup, headed towards the coffee urn to be filled up with the stimulating unexplainable? - The natural stimulant of not knowing – and accepting our lot, eh?

What do you accept or resist not knowing, or knowing?

Black Bear in the Orchard

It was a long winter.

But the bees were mostly awake

In their perfect house,

The workers whirling their wings

To make heat.

Then the bear woke,

To hungry not to remember

Where the orchard was,

And the hives.

He was not a picklock.

He was a sledge that leaned

Into their front wall and came out

The other side.

What could the bees do?

Their stings were as nothing.

They had planned everything

Sufficiently

Except for this: castastrophe.

They slumped under the bear’s breath.

They vanished into the curl of his tongue.

Some had just enough time

To think of how it might have been-

The cold easing,

The smell of leaves and flowers.

The curl of death wraps around me this morning. Overlooking the frog enshrouded San Diego harbor in the lightening sky, I have been watching the US Navy boats come in from the night’s patrol. I can just barely make out the silhouettes of protection and outrage. I think of the navy people, surprised by death in Pearl Harbor and countless other encounters on sea and land. Perhaps caught in their bunks by the warning siren, I wonder if they had time for regrets and mournings, of what they could have been and done. I imagine they did, as I do today, for who in the end can avoid catastrophe despite all our carefully laid plans and dreams? So too who can avoid perfection in the midst of chaos and nightmare? This morning, this inner mourning, I see how the water reflects light in the dark, as our lives reflect life in death.

Have you even been surprised by death or tragedy?

The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First

The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted, rode the wind. Its eye at this distance looked like green glass; its feet were the color of butter. Speed obvious-ly, was joy. But then, so was the sudden, slow circle it carved into the slightly silvery air, and the squaring of its shoulders, and the pulling into itself the long, sharp-edge wings, and the fall into the grass where it tussled a moment, like a bundle of brown leaves, and then, again, lifted itself into the air, that butter-color clenched in order to hold a small a small, still body, and it flew off as my mind sang out oh all that loose, blue rink of sky, where does it go to, and why?

Mary, are you trying to write yourself out of a job? Who needs poets if we just offer up to the world our attention? Indeed! Who needs ministesr, monks, priests, counselors, new age therapists, or even God? We have hawks, mice, the hunters and the hunted – all of reality is there for our grasping as we touch the earth and reach for the sky.

What job would you lose if others paid attention?

White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

I wonder what it is that I will accomplish today

If anything can be called that marvelous word.

It won’t be

My kind of work, which is only putting words on a page,

The pencil

Haltingly calling up

The light of the world,

Yet nothing appearing on paper half as bright

As the mockingbird’s verbal hilarity

In the still unleafed shrub in the churchyard-

Or the white heron rising over the swamp and the darkness,

His yellow eyes and broad wings wearing

The light of the world in the light of the world-

Ah yes, I see him.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Okay, I’m flat out disagreeing with Mary, although given the paradoxical nature of poems; she probably secretly led me into agreeing with her. I do believe that the poem on the paper is the light of the world as is the poet. The heron over the swamp is no more beautiful than the humans I saw in the hydrotherapy pool this morning. I’m at a resort/convention hotel in San Diego and after working out I limped over to the Jacuzzi to lessen the ache of my knee. In one corner of the Jacuzzi is a middle aged woman, her body bulging out of her suit. In another corner is an older man, he too rotund and big bandage covering a third of his face. I can go into judgment mind and ask what is right about we well-fed middle aged people relaxing in the middle of the day in an expensive hotel while billions upon billions of other beings are suffering? How is the work we putter with considered any kind of accomplishment amidst the beauty and tragedy that rises out of the ache of our hearts and the bodies of so many? I don’t rightly know how to answer this except to say that my inner knowing replies to the doubting mind that beauty is in all bodies and all words. And that means mine too.

What is it you hope to accomplish today, and is it enough?

Holding Benjamin

No use to tell him that he

And the raccoon are brothers.

You have your soft ideas about nature,

He has others,

And they are full of his

White teeth

And lip that curls, sometimes,

Horribly.

You love this earnest dog,

But also you admire the raccoon

And Lord help you in your place

Of hope and improbables.

To the black-masked gray one:

Run! You say Run!

You say and just as urgently, to the dog:

Stay!

And he won’t or he will,

Depending on more things than I could name.

He’s sure he’s right

And you, so tangled in your mind,

Are wrong,

Though patient and pacific.

And you are downcast.

And it’s his eyes, not yours,

That are clear and bright.

I once read an article about the violence between siblings. Brothers can pound horribly on one another – it is their way. So when I think of the raccoon and dog as brothers, and also caught in a terrible predator – prey cycle, I think of course, it is their way. Then I think of the human companion who feels the suffering of the one, and the responsibility of the other, and ultimately shame and guilt plays tag with acceptance for what is our way – to be complex social creatures who navigate in confusion the harm that we interconnected siblings inflict upon one another. We want there to be a right way and because we cannot discern how to meet everyone’s needs, we feel inadequate. What if we could move beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing as Rumi suggests in his poem?

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,

There is a field.

I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make sense.

We could lie down in that field and play, and as we rubbed our noses in the fresh dirt and smelled the flowers, our hands would linger upon a half-buried bone, a sign of the carnage of our past and of our future. My prayer is that we do not run from that field, but stay engaged with reality and one another – no wrong doing, no right doing, but sure as heck a lot of pain and discomfort. My eyes are bright with living this possibility well, of helping each other hold awareness and acceptance of not a soft nature, but of a terribly beautiful whole and hard nature.

Do you think that predation and prey is an inevitable cycle in our lives; or, can we use our evolution possibility to support collaboration even more than competition?

Mysteries, Four of the Simple Ones

How does the seed-grain feel

When it is just beginning to be wheat?

And how does the catbird feel

When the blue eggs break and become little catbirds?

Maybe on midsummer night’s eve,

And without fanfare?

And how does the turtle feel as she covers her eggs

With the sweep of her feet

Then leaves them for the world to take care of?

Does she know her accomplishment?

And when the blue heron, beaking his long breast feathers,

Sees one feather fall, does he know I will find it?

Will he see me holding it in my hand

As he opens his wings

Softly and without a sound-

As he rises and floats over the water?

And this is just any day at the edge of the pond,

A black and leafy pond without a name

Until I named it.

And what else can we do when the mysteries present themselves

But hope to pluck from the basket the brisk words

That will applaud them,

The heron, the turtle, the catbird, the seed-grain

Kneeling in the dark earth, its body

Opening into the golden world?

Mary has gotten into me. Does she know her accomplishment? Yesterday I spent all day in a conference center, and when evening came a group of us went along the San Diego bay front in search of our restaurant. As we walked I looked over the heads of the crowds onto the water, jammed with boats, and longed for my north Florida springs where I might be held in oneness and peace for a while. Homesickness I suppose, or spring sickness, or for Mary, pond sickness – I wanted to be home. Then this morning, oh so very early by Pacific Coast time, the sun a long way from showing me a golden world, I lay in my bed thinking of the springs and home. And of course I was there – the hotel air swirling around me held me in oneness and peace for a while. The litter dropped on last night’s sidewalk by a street vendor not so very different from the heron’s gifted feather. Reading Mary’s poems it seems that I open more to this world, my only accomplishment this day to kneel in the earth, or on the sidewalk, or the hotel fitness floor, and give word form to the mystery of grateful praise happening in me with you, reader and companion.

How do you name the mysteries in your life, both the grand and the nearly imperceptible?